A Friend of Mr. Lincoln (21 page)

“I
SAW HER,” ELLIE SAID.
“She came in yesterday.”

“Saw who?”

“Miss Todd from Kentucky. Mrs. Edwards's sister. Everybody's been talking about her coming, and now here she is.”

They were in the little office at the back of Ellie's store after closing hours. They had left the door to the office open, but all the store's shades were drawn and the lamps out, with only a single candle whose light was invisible to passersby. Ellie saw to these precautions each time he visited. Discretion mattered more to her than it did to him. He had watched caution seep into her character. Her new respectability as the proprietress of Springfield's best millinery shop—patronized by all the ladies of the coterie on Aristocracy Hill—was not to be risked.

The shop had been open for a little over a year now and Ellie had managed the business with efficiency. She had briskly met her projections, repaying Cage for the expenses he had forwarded and counting out his monthly share of the profits after they had gone over the books together and had satisfied their pent-up urges in the cramped back room. She had always been cooler and more pragmatic than he when it came to sexual matters, but the act of explaining her monthly expenses and profits to him greatly loosened her up. It almost seemed that letting him into her books was the same to her as letting him into her heart. She was thrilled by her success, so happy to be his partner that their common enterprise might, in her mind, be confused with the goal of marriage.

She was sitting back on a settee, a glass of wine in her hand, wearing only her chemise and the silk stockings she had not taken off during their lovemaking. Her feet were in Cage's lap, and she wiggled her toes to remind him that it was time to resume massaging them. Through the open office door both sides of the narrow shop seemed upholstered in sumptuous bolts of fabric—printed or regally plain—and open copies of
The Lady's Book
and books of fashion plates lined the accessory counters.

“She ordered two pelerines from me, one of lace and one of cotton lawn. She knows clothes and knows what she wants.”

“Is she here for a long time?”

“I hope so. I can use her business. Why don't you marry her? That's why she's here, of course, to find a husband.”

“I've never seen her.”

“You will. She'll be at the big cotillion they're having at the new hotel, to which I'm sure you're invited, unless you've broken with all your political friends. She's pretty enough, and frank, and very spirited. By which I mean bossy. She must be used to ordering slaves around back in Lexington.”

“There's no place in my life for another bossy woman,” Cage said. “Let her make somebody else miserable.”

“Vous parlez français!”
Mary Todd exclaimed to Cage the next week when he was introduced to her at the great cotillion the Whigs had gotten up at the American House. He had not meant to speak French to her, but she and her sister had been rapidly gossiping in that language in a corner of the ballroom when Elizabeth Edwards had hooked his arm and drawn him in for an introduction. He had become reasonably conversant in French during his European sojourn, and had just been idly translating Lamartine's
“Le Lac”
for his own amusement, and so it was almost instinctive on his part to offer a schoolbook
“Très hereux de faire votre connaissance.”
Or perhaps it was more calculated than that—perhaps he meant to impress her.

But she chattered on in French faster than he could follow, and seeing the look of growing incomprehension on his face she abandoned the pursuit and subtly shifted to English with no more of a break in the conversation than if they had been speaking in their native tongue all along.

She was young—hardly more than twenty—and lively and sharp. She leaned forward when she talked, her diamond-hard blue eyes drilling into him. The candlelight in the room created enticing hollows in her bare throat and shoulders. She had a firm, proud chin and her face was interestingly wide. She was asking what he thought of General Harrison. Wasn't it a shame that the presidential nomination had gone to him instead of Henry Clay, who deserved it so? There could not be a greater man than Clay in the whole country.

Stephen Douglas, who certainly considered himself a greater man than Clay, suddenly appeared at the edge of Cage's sight, bowing toward Miss Todd as a quadrille was starting up. She accepted the Little Giant with a brief curtsy, flashed a backward smile at Cage, and disappeared. There seemed to be a sudden hole in the atmosphere where she had just been standing, so definitive had her presence been. He could not see the dance floor from where he was standing. Everyone in Springfield appeared to have shown up at the cotillion, if only to escape the wet and dreary December weather that had been oppressing the city all week. And of course the party was an excuse to see the new hotel, which had been built with far more alacrity than the new statehouse, which still stood unfinished after two years of construction. From the look of the toolsheds and piles of building stone littering the square, Cage wondered if it would be another two years yet.

The American House was a huge edifice that was already a political hive, Whigs and Democrats and hardened Loco Focos buzzing about in its meeting rooms, plotting their way forward into the 1840 presidential contest, which everyone had chosen to believe would be an apocalyptic one, the election of Harrison or Van Buren offering a chance to save the country or cast it into its final ruin. But politics was, astonishingly, something of a side issue tonight. Both Lincoln's and Douglas's names had appeared among the cotillion managers on the invitation Cage had received, which also featured an illustration of the national eagle with a banner in its beak pointedly reading “E Pluribus Unum.” The idea of a greater good to which all partisans were ultimately pledged was of course nothing more than a warm illusion, but it was almost Christmas and people were in the mood to sustain it.

Cage wedged his way through the Turkish splendor of the American House toward the dance floor. The hotel was stuffed with opulent furniture and appurtenances, with beckoning landscape paintings and brilliant wallpaper whose patterns seemed to pulse in time with the music. He stood finally on the edge of the thick carpeting and watched the dancing. The quadrille ended fluidly and a high-spirited Scotch reel began. Cage watched Miss Todd weave among the dancers in her green dress, briefly connecting with Stephen Douglas, detaching, connecting again. Though her movements fit the same pattern as those of the other dancers, she seemed to be creating a living garment of her own. The tempo increased and the dance accelerated, the participants laughing, the audience gathered around them clapping in time. When Miss Todd swung past where he was standing, Cage noticed the sweat on her forehead, the delighted expression on her face.

He saw Lincoln on the far side of the room, wearing his cotillion-manager ribbon. He was talking to James Shields, the Irish-born state auditor. They were grinning, Lincoln gripping the smaller man's shoulders with both hands as he told a story. At its conclusion Shields threw his head back and laughed. He gave Lincoln an appreciative pat on his lapel and walked off shaking his head and smiling. He had a limp, the result of a fall to a ship's deck when he was a young merchant seaman. The limp was not pronounced but maybe enough to make him self-conscious on the dance floor. Cage did not really know Shields but was aware that he was not well-liked. He had a temper, though it was not on display tonight. And he had a very high opinion of himself. But who in this particular room did not?

As Shields walked away, Lincoln turned his attention toward the dance floor, watching the dancers as if their activity was as exotic as that of circus acrobats. Perhaps Mrs. Abell or one of the other married women who fussed over Abraham Lincoln had taught him some basic dance steps, but the blurry, whirling activity in the center of the room clearly outran his expertise.

“Is that Mr. Lincoln?” Mary Todd had suddenly appeared at Cage's side again. The music had stopped and she was fanning herself and gasping delightedly for breath.

“It is.”

“Well, I don't think he's nearly as ungainly as his reputation says he is. You must be a friend of Mr. Lincoln. What's he like?”

“Hard to sum up.”

“Well, he is rather monstrously tall. And Mr. Douglas is short enough to be stepped on. Are all Whigs and Democrats in Sangamon so ridiculously mismatched?”

“I'll introduce you to him,” Cage said.

“Thank you, but my brother-in-law is jealous of introductions. I'd better let him do it.”

Then she was gone again, gathered up by her friend Julia Jayne and some of the other young women who were repairing en masse to the ladies' lounge.

The next time he spotted her she was on the other side of the room, standing next to her brother-in-law, Ninian Edwards, as he presented her to Abraham Lincoln. Cage would remember the sight for the rest of his life—Mary's hand possessively on Lincoln's forearm as she gazed up at him, smiling, chattering, almost shaking with laughter at something he said in reply. And Lincoln bending down toward her, his expression both bashful and confident. She was probably not a beautiful woman. But she had so much liveliness and candor in her character that beauty was something people just naturally assumed she possessed as well.

That she was a little woman with very big needs was not yet obvious, though Cage understood from his first conversation with her that she had a restless will that any man who sought to marry her would have to accept and accommodate himself to. The American House that night was full of potential suitors—Stephen Douglas among them—and Cage would not have guessed that Abraham Lincoln would have ever found his way into the first rank. He looked oddly meek in her presence, towering over her like a tame camelopard.

“She knows Henry Clay!” Lincoln told Cage in wonderment toward four in the morning, when the party had at last begun to unravel and even Miss Todd was showing signs of fatigue. “She lived only a few miles from him in Lexington and used to visit him as a girl. She mentioned it as if it was a thing of no great importance. Why, I'd say it was a thing of great importance. It's like living down the road from George Washington!”

He said this as they were standing outside the American House with Speed and Billy Herndon watching Mary Todd disappear into a carriage with Mr. and Mrs. Edwards. The Edwardses were exhausted but their charge was still calling goodbye to everyone and waving from the carriage window as it drove off through the rain.

It was determined that with dawn so close at hand it would make no sense to go to bed, so the four of them, along with Ash Merritt and Ned Baker, walked through the rain to Speed's store, where they spent the rest of the night drinking Speed's Kentucky bourbon in the upper room. Since it was near Christmas and the cotillion had been such a marked success, Lincoln allowed Speed for once to pour a drop or two into his water cup, and he raised it in a toast, declaring that to live on the Illinois prairies at the close of the year of 1839 was like living in Eden before the Fall. Or would be if the state bank was solvent enough to pay out its notes in specie. Or if the money for the internal improvements system, all of those new railroads and canals that he and the rest of the Whigs had so feverishly sponsored, had not been squandered due to theft and mismanagement.

Speaking of the Garden of Eden, Lincoln said, reminded him of a man named Cain who owned a mill in Adams County. His pecker was of such a remarkably long and slantindicular character that it was said that he could fuck a farmer's wife two counties over while lying flat on his back reading the
Quincy Whig.

There was another story after that, of course, a long one about a hunter who skinned a bear in an ingenious manner that left its pizzle intact and still functional. One night, during the Deep Snow of 1830, he and his wife were lying under the bearskin shivering…